


The Good Son

by verdenal



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-22
Updated: 2012-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-05 20:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdenal/pseuds/verdenal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is a very good liar. He learns just how good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Good Son

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, god. Okay. I wrote this immediately after I lost my own father as some sort of way to parse how I was feeling, so this might not be a portrait of universal Grief, but rather one specific facet of it.

Sam is a good liar. He has to be; at every one of the twenty-plus schools he’s attended, he inevitably has to lie about where his dad is, what he’s doing, why he came in the middle of the year, and about his brother. Everyone either loves (girls) or hates (boyfriends) Dean, and so Sam finds himself lying about Dean, about what he likes, because hustling pool and shooting things in the face aren’t normal interests. So, yeah, Sam’s a pretty good liar. He just doesn’t realize how good he is until Stanford.

Stanford is going be different, Sam decides. He’s going to be here for the long haul: four years, not three weeks. Everyone knows where he lives and what he does outside of class. Nothing to hide.

That goes out the window during the second full day of orientation. The whole thing in general is unbearably dorky, and they’re playing some exceptionally dorky getting-to-know-you game, and if Dean were here he would make fun of Sam for at least the next month and a half. (“Really, Sammy, two lies and a truth? I didn’t know we sent you to Girl Scout camp.”) He can’t think of two actual truths that aren’t stupid, like his name or the fact that he was born in Lawrence. When they get round to him he bites at his lips and makes a show of trying to think.

“Okay. Uh, my grandparents immigrated from Germany, I haven’t had a permanent address since I was a baby, and,” he pauses, “I’ve been hunting since I was six.” 

He feels kind of guilty, but two lies and a truth is almost the same thing. Sam has no idea where his grandparents were from (Kansas, probably), and he actually started hunted three days before his six birthday, when he helped Dean salt some bones because things had gotten a little out of control and Dad hadn’t wanted him at the hotel by himself.

He can see people thinking, trying to outsmart him, but it only takes twelve seconds for some guy to say, “Second one. No way did you never have a permanent address.”

Sam only smiles. “Well, am I right?” The guy asks.

“Yeah,” Sam admits with a shrug. Technically, he does have an address now, and even if it’s a dorm room it’s a lot more permanent than anything else he’s ever known, so the guilt abates a little bit. They move on to the next girl, a blonde California girl who has, actually, been to Africa, as Sam guesses.

It only gets harder after that, and that’s when Sam learns how well he lies. Stanford is different: he can’t tell incredible stories, stories that will inevitably get tangled and end up exposing him (as what, Sam doesn’t know), so he sticks to the truth as closely as he can.

He and his friends, mostly from his dorm, a few from his Spanish class, are sitting in Liam’s room, drinking and talking about themselves when Sam tells the first of his two big lies. Everything else he does is most stretching and obscuring the truth because it can’t be told, but he lies, outright, about two things.

One: “My brother and I don’t really get along. He looked after me when I was little, but we stopped talking after that,” Sam says, shrugging. He can’t think of a way to write Dean out of his stories otherwise, since all of his memories of Dean are inappropriate or revelatory in some way,

And two: “I wasn’t really the favored son.” A lot of stuff comes after that, but it’s mostly irrelevant. Looking back, Sam realizes this is the dangerous lie, the lie that he believed. Not talking about Dean only made him miss his brother more, made him flip open his phone and stare at Dean’s number and wonder if he should call and ask how things are. He never does, but he wants to. 

Sam manages to seem perfectly normal, or as normal as a motherless kid who may have grown up in the back of an Impala can, until his first Spring Break. He had caved on the Impala thing because he finally had to explain why he had no friends before college. No one had believed him when he said he was just a loser.

But for Spring Break he and some of his friends go down to L.A just for kicks. They’re dumbass college kids, none of whom have actually been to the city before, and, of course, they end up where they shouldn’t. It’s stupid and cliché, but someone has to be the cautionary tale, Sam thinks when he hears footsteps approaching.

It’s a couple of guys with guns, and Sam’s friends kind of lose their cool just a little bit, flinging their wallets and running but not really moving. Sam takes a deep breath and punches the nearest guy in the face, grabbing his gun. The Winchesters didn’t just hunt things; they saved people, too. It’s been beaten into him since he was eight or nine and Dean had really spilled the beans about what he and Dad did. (The salt’nburn had been played off as a game, and Sam had let it go.) He’s not really thinking as he knocks the first guy out and levels the gun at the second.

It’s not a shot he’s going to miss. John Winchester, for all his failings as a father, was a magnificent teacher, or drill sergeant, depending on who you asked. Sam’s about to pull the trigger when he hears Melanie in the background shouting “Oh my god!” and he remembers that the man on the other side of his gun is just that: a man, not a monster. He hesitates, and gets shot.

Dean would have said he had it coming, spacing out like that in the middle of a fight, and John would have turned away, tight lipped. His friends panic and rush towards him, but Sam just takes advantage of the confusion and manages to knock out the second man. His arm burns and he can’t stop the blood flow with just his fingers so he doesn’t try, but wipes his prints from the gun as best he can with their attacker’s shirt and turns back to his friends.

“Um, maybe we should try to find the hotel.”

How they manage to get back, Sam doesn’t really quite remember, but he knows he insisted on not going to the hospital. He can’t really afford it, and ninety percent of the ID he’s carrying is fake. When they get him back to the hotel room Sam chokes back a laugh. He’s seen Dean and his father do this so many times, sewing themselves up in dingy motel rooms with a bottle of whiskey on the nightstand. He used to help them, when he got older and forced them to treat him like an adult.

There’s still a first aid kit in his bag; old habits die hard, if they die at all. Sam’s done with hunting, but he knows that some things don’t forgive, or forget. “Look,” he starts, “if you get squeamish at all, uh, this is probably going to get pretty gross, so,” as he trails off half the group leaves, shooting him apologetic looks over their shoulders.

“Are you sure you don’t need help?” Melanie asks.

“Someone might need to hold a couple of things, but I know what I’m doing. I…uh…” he scrambles for an excuse, “I accidentally shot my brother once.”

“What?”

“We were hunting, and what I thought was a deer was actually my brother.” Sam laughs at that, at the idea of ever not recognizing Dean. That seems to lighten the mood, and he has no problem getting Melanie to boil water in the coffee pot so he can sterilize the tongs he fishes the bullet out with, and the needle he uses to sew his flesh back together.

After that year, he doesn’t see most of those people again. While he spends most of his first summer alone in California beating himself up over the whole thing he tries to stay optimistic because this is for the long haul. He can’t run away or transfer; he’s stuck.

That summer he figures out he wants to be a lawyer, and when Sam gets back to Stanford he joins the Pre-Law Society. His ruse is easier to maintain there, since they usually talk about law school and classes than where they grew up. Sam meets Toby at a PLS meeting. They hit it off almost instantly and three weeks later Sam thinks he may have a best friend for the first time in his life.

Toby’s good natured, wants to go into international law, and doesn’t much care about Sam’s childhood or lack thereof. He makes it easy for Sam to sum up most of his life with the words, “We moved around a lot.”

He meets Jess that year, too. The second day of his gen chem class he’s running late and the first open seat he sees is next to this beautiful blonde girl who’s so focused on the lecture she doesn’t even look at him until he leans over and whispers, “Hey, I’m Sam. Did I miss anything?”

Then she turns and smiles at him, and her lips are full and her eyes crinkle at the edges. “Not really,” she tells him. “I’m Jessica, but you can call me Jess.”

He asks her out for coffee after class. Later, he wants to count that as their first date, but Jess prefers to start from the first time they went to dinner together, three days later. 

Their whole relationship is like that, a whirlwind of falling, and Sam thinks that maybe this is how John had loved Mary, and the sight of Jess on the ceiling would do something to him, too, but he doesn’t forgive. He can’t forgive, wouldn’t know what to do if his father stopped being the enemy, stopped being the reason for all his pain.

He tells Jess as much as he can. He tells her about growing up in the Impala’s back seat, and changing schools three times in a year, give or take a few, and about Thanksgiving at other people’s houses. He tells her the same two lies, though, and every time he wakes up to the dark press of her lashes against her cheek he regrets it.

She calls him out, actually. They’re playing around and she grabs his phone, starts looking through it for embarrassing pictures. What she finds is one picture each of Dean and his father. Sam had taken them in the aftermath of a hunt, when no one was really paying attention to Sam. He’d toyed with deleting them after his first weeks at Stanford, but he can’t.

Dean and John could die so easily: hunt gone wrong, angry monster finally gets lucky, even another hunter. (The Winchesters aren’t exactly anyone’s favorites.) Sam knows this, and so he can’t quite let them go. What if, one day while Sam’s in class or at dinner with Jess, a demon gets lucky? 

When Jess asks him, then, about his brother, about his father, he can only look at her, too choked with a strange and familiar fear. 

“Sam?” She asks, again. She’s being reasonable, Sam thinks, for someone who’s been lied to for a while, by someone she loves.

“My brother raised me,” he starts, and nothing seems to come after.

“So you said.”

“My brother, Dean,” he says, and realizes that this may be the first time he’s really said Dean’s name aloud in years, “he, we’re different, like, really different, he only has his GED, doesn’t care, but…”

“But he’s your brother.”

“Yeah,” Sam agrees. “He was the good son, the favored one…” and leaves it at that.

Jess is tactful enough not to bring up John, and Sam doesn’t broach the subject either. The picture of Dad really is just so Sam can have proof that he once had a father. He tells himself that, at least. 

Jess does try once, after they move in together and it’s obvious to everyone that Sam is going to propose as soon as they graduate. Sometimes they talk about the wedding after dinner and a few drinks. Sam doesn’t care if Toby and the rest of his guy friends roll their eyes and call him whipped. He’s going to have a family. A real, normal family, and his kids will get the chance to grow up as children ought.

Jess’s parents love him, and they’re as excited as he is and one day she says to him, “I know you don’t talk to them much,” and Sam starts panicking right then and there, “but am I going to get to meet your family before we get married?”

“Jess, they’re not, they won’t, they,” he sighs. “Look, they’re furious that I left. At least, my dad was. Dean, he’s probably upset,” and Sam pauses to chuckle at how much of an understatement that is, “and if Dad won’t come, and he won’t, neither will Dean.” Jess looks unconvinced at best. “Besides, they’re not the sort of people you’d want at a wedding.”

“They’re your family,” she protests, “of course I want to meet them.”

“No.” Sam surprises himself with how forceful he is. “Not anymore. This,” he takes her hands, “you, are my family now.”

She doesn’t say anything.

The next morning Sam wakes up significantly more sober than he was the night before, and steadfastly refuses to think about what he said.

Jess abandons the topic after that, though whenever marriage comes up she gives him the weird sidelong glances that Sam pretends he doesn’t see. He has a lot of practice pretending; it’s a form of lying, after all.

Then one night, someone breaks into their house and Sam flashes back to his first Spring Break, three years ago. He’d promised himself not to ever do something like that again, something that could reveal to Jess exactly what he learned in those long years that she thinks were just spent in the Impala.

He’s got the bat, and he tells Jess not to worry, it’s probably nothing, but Sam knows the sound of a man treading on floorboards. He hopes it’s a stupid highschooler he can throw out on his ass but as he swings down a hand grips the bat and wrenches. A few seconds later he’s on the floor wrestling with the intruder and then his eyes fly open and, of course it’s Dean.

He knew it was Dean the minute the fight had started. His brother is as familiar to him, still, as his own self.

Then Jess is downstairs, beautiful and rumpled in her pajamas and Dean is leering at her. Everything is ruined, and all Sam can think about is getting Dean out of their home as quickly as possible. Jess seems genuinely pleased to meet Dean, and she’s peering around Sam as he tries his best to herd her away from Dean’s gaze.”

“Anyway, I gotta borrow your boyfriend here, talk about some private family business, but, uh, nice meeting you.”

“No. No. Whatever you wanna say you can say it in front of her.” He tries to force Dean’s hand, because Dean’s as uptight as Sam is about the family secret. He should leave now, and maybe he’ll be furious but Sam’s pretty sure that he can get away with anything when it comes to Dean.

“Okay. Um…dad hasn’t been home in a few days.”

“So he’s working over-time on a ‘Miller Time’ shift; he’ll stumble back in sooner or later.” It didn’t need to be said, but the way Dean’s face darkens is almost worth it, and Jess makes a little noise somewhere in between sympathy and shock.

“Dad’s on a hunting trip and he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

Oh. Sam’s been mentally preparing himself for this for years. He has the picture, it won’t affect his financial aid, he’s tried to think of himself as without a father, but the idea of John Winchester being dead makes something in his chest catch.

He takes Dean outside. Jess tries to stop him on the way out but he won’t let her.

It’s the last time he sees her.

When he comes back from the hunt, without his father, he stretches out on his bed, waits for Jessica to come out of the bathroom, and her blood drips onto his face.

He’s out of the house before Dean’s gone.

After that everything is a sort of red haze (which, years later, after he’s darkened his lips and his soul with another red, will seem prophetic) and every time Dean mentions Dad all Sam can hear is “someone who can find Yellow-Eyes.” For the first time he really understand John Winchester, and in his darker moments, when the only thing behind his eyelids is Jess’s body, he almost forgives.

That sentiment lasts until they actually find their father, and while Dean’s starry-eyed and as thirsty for approval as he’s always been, Sam remembers in bright flashes every fight, every argument they’ve ever had. John ceases to be a means for revenge and shrinks back into the man who told Sam never to come back.

And of course Dean plays the good son, points them both away from one another and towards the demon, never actually mentions what it does to him to be on the outside of all this anger and Sam doesn’t see. 

When they get the Colt the fire running through his veins (something he laughs at in the future, when withdrawal has ravaged him) relaxes. Everything becomes cold and clear. His breath comes in long, slow bursts. The world narrows down to a single, yellow-eyed point. John becomes his ally now, even though they argue about everything, except the end results: kill the demon. Dean wants it dead, too, but Sam doesn’t see the same rage in him. 

And then, quite literally, they crash.

Sam doesn’t really understand why, of the three of them, he gets away. Of course he’s banged up and terrified, but John needs a day before he can get his body to move without screaming, and Dean—

Dean always pays.

That’s the first truth Sam finds after his years of lying. It’s bound up with the much safer realization of exactly how much he loves his brother. Seeing Dean marooned in a sea of white cotton does things to his chest that Jessica’s death didn’t. They’re different pains, Sam thinks, different but equal.

And John Winchester doesn’t seem to feel a thing, lying in his bed while Dean slowly dies a death he doesn’t deserve. It infuriates Sam, and so he reacts the only way he’s ever known: he yells at his father, tries to scream down the wall of indifference he has erected. Sam can remember worry on John’s face before: when he’d finally gotten found after running away in Flagstaff, the time he had fractured his ribs and dislocated his shoulder thanks to one furious poltergeist, as he turned away to leave forever.

Sam, in addition to lying well, is a genius. Really. His LSAT score was ridiculous, and that’s barely representative of what his mind can do. Of course he spots the pattern, but he blocks that knowledge away. It’s easy; he’s sick with fear for Dean, and it’s easy to let that bleed into anger.

Dean surges back into awareness an hour or so later, Sam can’t keep track of time in this place. Dean hates tears and expressions of emotion so as soon as Sam starts to speak Dean kicks him out and tells him to bring back something to drink. 

He arrives in time to see John pull back from Dean, where he had no doubt been whispering some deep family secret, the sort of thing Sam had been jealously guarded from all his life, and crumple to the floor. Dean’s face goes soft in the eyes and hard in the mouth. Sam drops his coffee and it bounces perfectly. John Winchester’s heart isn’t beating. His face is calm, and his body splayed inelegantly. He is dead.

Sam’s father is dead.

In the hospital it seems unreal; there are nurses and doctors and all sorts of people who specialize in removing the permanence of death. He can push it away for the few hours where they won’t let Dean go, even though he is perfectly healthy.

Outside, though, calling Bobby and trying to explain, Sam can’t handle it. He’s absurdly grateful to Dean for making the call himself, for the low gravel of Dean’s voice, no different from any other day. He can almost pretend it didn’t happen.

That’s really what he does all the way back to Bobby’s, before the cremation. After, he watches the flames die down and thinks of John teaching him to light a fire, to load a gun, to protect himself.

One of the reasons Sam is such a good liar is that he is very convincing, and very charming. Even if you recognize the lie at first, he sells it so well that it seems much better than the truth. Sam isn’t an exception to this.

Dean won’t talk to him no matter how hard Sam tries, for both their sakes. John Winchester was so much of Sam’s life that of course his loss means something, and so he can only imagine what it does to Dean, Dean who, when Dad said jump, already knew how high.

Sam finally asks Bobby about it, if Dean has said anything to him and Bobby just looks at him out of the corner of his eye and says, “John Winchester was a good friend of mine, and a damn good hunter, but one thing he was not was a good father, not to you and certainly not to Dean.”

“But he…Dean…” Sam doesn’t have anything to say that, really. This lie he’s built up around his father has many rooms, many aspects. He’s beginning to accept that his father loved him, loved, God, the past tense. But Dean has always been the good son, always Dad’s favorite, the one who knew the truth, who took Dad’s car and his taste in music and his attitudes towards everything but women.

“Don’t be an idjit, Sam. John didn’t treat Dean like a son anymore’n he treated you like a hunter.”

“But, Dean, he was,” Sam knows he sounds petulant and Bobby looks a little like he’s going to yell or smack him, but his father has also just died and Sam doesn’t quite know what to do with himself, “he was the good son.”

“God only knows why,” Bobby mutters and then immediately shakes his head. “You know I don’t mean that.”

“I know,” Sam tells him and it’s true. He knows that Bobby and his dad were as close as hunters can get, and Bobby thinks of them as his own children. He’s also known that Dean was the good little soldier since he first started going head to head with John. He’s had all the pieces for a long time, but he deliberately put them together all backwards.  
Outside, Dean fixes the Impala with obsessive care, because he loves that car, the car his father used to drive. Sam wants to talk to him but Dean takes his grief and winds it up tight, shoves it deep down into his core and lives with it. Sam can’t do that. He needs to talk, to lay out what he thinks and feels to understand it. 

Dean can swallow all of this because Dad trained him to. Dad taught him that before everything else there was the job and Sam’s safety. As soon as the car’s fixed and they’re back on the road Dean will be able to right himself.

The part of Sam that’s a genius is pretty sure that Dean will eventually crack from the inside out, can already see the tiny fissures around his eyes and in the rougher edge to his voice. But Sam can barely think straight through the haze of grief and guilt.

Dean distracts him, because Dean’s guilt is such a strange beast to him. It’s how he understands grief, intellectually, and the mind has always been Sam’s refuge. He would read when things got too terrible between him and his father, he threw himself into the Stanford application when their animosity reached its peak. Dena’s grief lets him dissect it. Dean doesn’t, but his grief is fairly uncomplicated as far as Sam can see, and he has always been able to see far more clearly into Dean than into himself, he likes to think.

Dad was everything to Dean; he makes up more of Dean’s self than either of them is comfortable admitting. That’s how Sam understands grief, how loosing Jess felt: a vivisection, a deep cutting into his heart and his identity. He knows he’s distraught when he starts thinking in words like distraught and vivisection, but Dean refuses to talk, so he has to say them to himself.

He had thought that, after Jess, nothing would hurt again. After all, he had taken everything he felt for Dean, for his father, for the idea of family that the Winchesters prized above all else and transferred it to her. When she died he had known it was his fault, and all Dean had been able to do was try and convince Same that the Winchester curse wasn’t his fault. He thought the guilt of killing the love of his life would be the final straw, the last scar he would have to bear.

Obviously, he was wrong. He clung to his lies so long he believed them for those four long years in California. Sam believed his father hated him, blamed him for his mother’s death, favored Dean. Dean was the good son: Sam knows this is true, but John treated him like a soldier. He sees Bobby’s pinched expression when tries to strengthen that lie, the way Bobby looked at him like he was crazy.

Maybe he is.

As much as he hates John Winchester, and he’s not alone in that, no, he has most of the hunting community on board for that, he loves his father. John was a brutal taskmaster, a man consumed with vengeance like Sam is now, but he always tried to shield Sam. He resented that once he got older and learned that Dean had known the truth for years, but as he watches Dean he’s suddenly thankful. Dean’s a good man, the good son, and he’ll never have the same shot at a normal life that Sam had. He doesn’t know how to. His love is rough and protective, shown with a gun pointed at the door. 

The good son. Out there now, fixing his father’s car if he can’t fix his body, desperately trying to repay him. That’s it, Sam thinks. Dean would be able to come to terms with Dad going down to a poltergeist, a misjudged beast, even Yellow-Eyes in combat, but not like this. Not for him. He’s always understood himself as the proverbial hammer, an extension of his father’s will. 

Unfortunately, Sam keeps coming back to himself. He understands Dean’s feelings so well, he thinks, but he can’t look at his own without a blinding haze of guilt. Dean and John, whatever the nature of their relationship, were close. Sam hadn’t talked with his father for four years before Yellow-Eyes showed them they were father and son deep in their bones.

Sam left.

That’s the root of it, and grasping on it, turning it over in the light and trying to understand it hurts, hurts more than even Jess. 

He left, and now John is dead and he’s spent so much of his life lying about him. His father loved him, and Sam is exactly three days too late. He was the bad seed, even if in the Winchester family being the bad seed means getting a full ride to Stanford and a 173 on the LSAT, and his father did everything he could to protect him. He co-opted Dean’s entire life into keeping Sam safe.

And Sam wasn’t even there.

Not for the last years of John’s life, not for the moment when he collapsed, perfectly dead.

Dean was, of course, because Dean is the good son.

Through the window Sam can see him take a crowbar to the Impala and something deep in his chest breaks when he thought there was nothing left to break. Sam can’t go to his brother, not with his selfish grief, his guilt as all he has to put up against Dean’s sorrow, Dean’s confusion. 

Dean has always been the good son, and Sam has reaped his rewards. And now they can never make it right.


End file.
